Settling in Seattle

Seattle from the airI defended my dissertation three months ago. Since then, it feels like everything has changed.

I’ve moved from Somerville to Seattle, moved from MIT to the University of Washington, and gone from being a graduate student to a professor. Mika and I have moved out of a multi-apartment cooperative into into a small apartment we’re calling Extraordinary Least Squares. We’ve gone from a broad and deep social network to (almost) starting from scratch in a new city.

As things settle and I develop a little extra bandwidth, I am trying to take time to get connected to my community. If you’re in Seattle and know me, drop me a line! If you’re in Seattle but don’t know me yet, do the same so we can fix that!

The Remixing Dilemma: The Trade-off Between Generativity and Originality

This post was written with Andrés Monroy-Hernández. It is a summary of a paper just published in American Behavioral Scientist. You can also read the full paper: The remixing dilemma: The trade-off between generativity and originality. It is part of a series of papers I have written with Monroy-Hernández using data from Scratch. You can find the others on my academic website.

Remixing — the reworking and recombination of existing creative artifacts — represents a widespread, important, and controversial form of social creativity online. Proponents of remix culture often speak of remixing in terms of rich ecosystems where creative works are novel and highly generative. However, examples like this can be difficult to find. Although there is a steady stream of media being shared freely on the web, only a tiny fraction of these projects are remixed even once. On top of this, many remixes are not very different from the works they are built upon. Why is some content more attractive to remixers? Why are some projects remixed in deeper and more transformative ways?
Remix Diagram
We try to shed light on both of these questions using data from Scratch — a large online remixing community. Although we find support for several popular theories, we also present evidence in support of a persistent trade-off that has broad practical and theoretical implications. In what we call the remixing dilemma, we suggest that characteristics of projects that are associated with higher rates of remixing are also associated with simpler and less transformative types of derivatives.

Our study is focused on two interrelated research questions. First, we ask why some projects shared in remixing communities are more or less generative than others. “Generativity” — a term we borrow from Jonathan Zittrain — describes creative works that are likely to inspire follow-on work. Several scholars have offered suggestions for why some creative works might be more generative than others. We focus on three central theories:

  1. Projects that are moderately complicated are more generative. The free and open source software motto “release early and release often” suggests that simple projects will offer more obvious opportunities for contribution than more polished projects. That said, projects that are extremely simple (e.g., completely blank slates) may also uninspiring to would-be contributors.
  2. Projects by prominent creators are more generative. The reasoning for this claim comes from the suggestion that remixing can act as a form of cultural conversation and that the work of popular creators can act like a common medium or language.
  3. Projects that are remixes themselves are more generative. The reasoning for this final claim comes from the idea that remixing thrives through the accumulation of contributions from groups of people building on each other’s work.

Our second question focuses on the originality of remixes and asks when more or less transformative remixing occurs. For example, highly generative projects may be less exciting if the projects produced based on them are all near-identical copies of antecedent projects. For a series of reasons — including the fact that increased generativity might come by attracting less interested, skilled, or motivated individuals — we suggest that each of the factors associated with generativity will also be associated with less original forms of remixing. We call this trade-off the remixing dilemma.

We answer both of our research questions using a detailed dataset from Scratch, where young people build, share, and collaborate on interactive animations and video games. The community was built to support users of the Scratch programming environment, a desktop application with functionality similar to Flash created by the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab. Scratch is designed to allow users to build projects by integrating images, music, sound, and other media with programming code. Scratch is used by more than a million users, most of them under 18 years old.

To test our three theories about generativity, we measure whether or not, as well as how many times, Scratch projects were remixed in a dataset that includes every shared project. Although Scratch is designed as a remixing community, only around one tenth of all Scratch projects are ever remixed. Because more popular projects are remixed more frequently simply because of exposure, we control for the number of times each project is viewed.

Our analysis shows at least some support for all three theories of generativity described above. (1) Projects with moderate amounts of code are remixed more often than either very simple or very complex projects. (2) Projects by more prominent creators are more generative. (3) Remixes are more likely to attract remixers than de novo projects.

To test our theory that there is a trade-off between generativity and originality, we build a dataset that includes every Scratch remix and its antecedent. For each pair, we construct a measure of originality by comparing the remix to its antecedent and computing an “edit distance” (a concept we borrow from software engineering) to determine how much the projects differ.

We find strong evidence of a trade-off: (1) Projects of moderate complexity are remixed more lightly than more complicated projects. (2) Projects by more prominent creators tend to be remixed in less transformative ways. (3) Cumulative remixing tends to be associated with shallower and less transformative derivatives. That said, our support for (1) is qualified in that we do not find evidence of the increased originality for the simplest projects as our theory predicted.

Two plots of estimated values for prototypical projects. Panel 1 (left) display predicted probabilities of being remixed. Panel 2 (right) display predicted edit distances. Both panels show predicted values for both remixes and de novo projects from 0 to 1,204 blocks (99th percentile).
Two plots of estimated values for prototypical projects. Panel 1 (left) displays predicted probabilities of being remixed. Panel 2 (right) displays predicted edit distances. Both panels show predicted values for both remixes and de novo projects from 0 to 1,204 blocks (99th percentile).

We feel that our results raise difficult but important challenges, especially for the designers of social media systems. For example, many social media sites track and display user prominence with leaderboards or lists of aggregate views. This technique may lead to increased generativity by emphasizing and highlighting creator prominence. That said, it may also lead to a decrease in originality of the remixes elicited. Our results regarding the relationship of complexity to generativity and originality of remixes suggest that supporting increased complexity, at least for most projects, may have fewer drawbacks.

As supporters and advocates of remixing, we feel that although highly generative works that lead to highly original derivatives may be rare and difficult for system designers to support, understanding remixing dynamics and encouraging these rare projects remain a worthwhile and important goal.

Benjamin Mako Hill, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Andrés Monroy-Hernández, Microsoft Research

For more, see our full paper, “The remixing dilemma: The trade-off between generativity and originality.” Published in American Behavioral Scientist. 57-5, Pp. 643—663. (Official Link, Pay-Walled ).

The Cost of Collaboration for Code and Art

This post was written with Andrés Monroy-Hernández for the Follow the Crowd Research Blog. The post is a summary of a paper forthcoming in Computer-Supported Cooperative Work 2013. You read also read the full paper: The Cost of Collaboration for Code and Art: Evidence from Remixing. It is part of a series of papers I have written with Monroy-Hernández using data from Scratch. You can find the others on my academic website.

Does collaboration result in higher quality creative works than individuals working alone? Is working in groups better for functional works like code than for creative works like art? Although these questions lie at the heart of conversations about collaborative production on the Internet and peer production, it can be hard to find research settings where you can compare across both individual and group work and across both code and art. We set out to tackle these questions in the context of a very large remixing community.

Example of a remix in the Scratch online community, and the project it is based off. The orange arrows indicate pieces which were present in the original and reused in the remix.

Remixing platforms provide an ideal setting to answer these questions. Most support the sharing, and collaborative rating, of both individually and collaboratively authored creative works. They also frequently combine code with artistic media like sound and graphics.

We know that that increased collaboration often leads to higher quality products. For example, studies of Wikipedia have suggested that vandalism is detected and removed within minutes, and that high quality articles in Wikipedia, by several measures, tend to be produced by more collaboration. That said, we also know that collaborative work is not always better — for example, that brainstorming results in less good ideas when done in groups. We attempt to answer this broad question, asked many times before, in the context of remixing: Which is the better description, “the wisdom of crowds” or “too many cooks spoil the broth”? That, fundamentally, forms our paper’s first research question: Are remixes, on average, higher quality than single-authored works?

A number of critics of peer production, and some fans, have suggested that mass collaboration on the Internet might work much better for certain kinds of works. The argument is that free software and Wikipedia can be built by a crowd because they are functional. But more creative works — like music, a novel, or a drawing — might benefit less, or even be hurt by, participation by a crowd. Our second research question tries to get at this possibility: Are code-intensive remixes, higher quality than media-intensive remixes?

We try to answers to these questions using a detailed dataset from Scratch – a large online remixing community where young people build, share, and collaborate on interactive animations and video games. The community was built to support users of the Scratch programming environment: a desktop application with functionality similar to Flash created by the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab. Scratch is designed to allow users to build projects by integrating images, music, sound and other media with programming code. Scratch is used by more than a million, mostly young, users.

Measuring quality is tricky and we acknowledge that there are many ways to do it. In the paper, we rely most heavily a measure of peer ratings in Scratch called loveits — very similar to “likes” on Facebook. We find similar results with several other metrics and we control for the number of views a project receives.

In answering our first research question, we find that remixes are, on average, rated as being of lower quality than works of single authorship. This finding was surprising to us but holds up across a number of alternative tests and robustness checks.

In answering our second question, we find rough support for the common wisdom that remixing tends to be more effective for functional works than for artistic media. The more code-intensive a project is, on average, the closer the gap is between a remix and a work of single authorship. But the more media-intensive a project is, the bigger the gap. You can see the relationships that our model predicts in the graph below.

Two plots of estimated values for prototypical projects showing the predicted number of loveits using our estimates. In the left panel, the x-axis varies number of blocks while holding media intensity at the sample median. The right panel varies the number of media elements while holding the number of blocks at the sample median. Ranges for each are from 0 to the 90th percentile.

Both of us are supporters and advocates of remixing. As a result, we were initially a little troubled by our result in this paper. We think the finding suggests an important limit to the broadest claims of the benefit of collaboration in remixing and peer production.

That said, we also reject the blind repetition of the mantra that collaboration is always better — for every definition of “better,” and for every type of work. We think it’s crucial to learn and understand the limitations and challenges associated with remixing and we’re optimistic that this work can influence the design of social media and collaboration systems to help remixing and peer production thrive.

For more, see our full paper, The Cost of Collaboration for Code and Art: Evidence from Remixing.

User Innovation on NPR Radio

I was invited onto NPR in Boston this week for a segment on user innovation alongside Eric von Hippel (my advisor at MIT) and Carliss Baldwin from Harvard Business School.

I talked about innovation that has happened on the CHDK platform — a cool firmware hack for Canon cameras example I use in some of my teaching — plus a little bit about free software, the democratization of development and design tools, and a little bit about user communities that LEGO has cultivated.

I would have liked the conversation and terminology to do more to emphasize user freedom and free software, but I’m otherwise pretty happy with the result. The segment will be aired again on NPR in Boston this weekend and is available on the WGBH website.

The Global Iron Blogger Network

Since last November, I’ve been participating in and coordinating Iron Blogger: a drinking club where you pay $5 to a "beer" pool if you fail to blog weekly.

The revival of Iron Blogger in Boston has been a big success. Even more exciting, however, is that Iron Blogger concept has spread. There are now two other Iron Blogger instances: in San Francisco coordinated by Parker Higgens, and in Berlin run by Nicole Ebber and Michelle Thorne.

Yesterday, we convened a virtual meeting of the Global Iron Blogger Council (i.e., an email thread) and we all agreed a new on iron blogger rule that might sweeten the deal for jet-setting prospective Iron Bloggers: any paid-up member of any Iron Blogger club can attend meet-ups in any other Iron Blogger cities if they happen to be in town for one. Because We Are One.

If you want to join us in Boston, we have some room through attrition. Rust bloggers, perhaps? If you’d like to join, you should contact me.

And if you’d like to set up your own in a different city, the code is in git. One warning, however. As those of us that have set it up have figured out, the documentation for the software to run Iron Blogger is between poor and non-existent. If you do want to set up your own instance, please get in touch. I’m happy to give you some pointers that you’ll probably need but, more importantly, I’d like to work with the next brave soul to put together documentation of the setup process along the way.

My Setup

The Setup is an awesome blog that posts of interviews with nerdy people that ask the same four questions:

  1. Who are you, and what do you do?
  2. What hardware are you using?
  3. And what software?
  4. What would be your dream setup?

I really care about my setup so I am excited, and honored, that they just posted an interview with me!

I answer questions about my setup often so I tried to be comprehensive with the hope that I will be able to point people to it in the future.

Update: I wrote this several years ago. If you’re interested, I’ve been keeping a ChangeLog of things I’ve added, changed, or removed from my setup.

Unhappy Birthday Hall of Shame

/copyrighteous/images/no_happy_bday.png

I roll my eyes a little when I think that Unhappy Birthday is the document I have written that has been read by the most people. The page — basically a website encouraging people to rat on their friends for copyright violation for singing Happy Birthday in public — has received millions of page views and has generated tons of its own media (including a rather memorable interview of CBC’s WireTap). At the bottom of the page I am listed, by name and email, as the “copyrighteous spokesman” for the initiative.

And since the page has been online, I have received hate mail about it. Constantly.

Since the email only goes to me, I thought it might be fun to share some of these publicly. All these messages are quoted verbatim but I have not included the senders’ names. Be warned: the language is often salty.

This email is years old now but it is probably still my favorite:

Atrocity and strife run rampant in this world.

Babies are abandoned in dumpsters. Teachers molest students. Impoverished Indonesians make sneakers for pennies while the spoiled jackhole in the 30-second commercial makes millions for sinking a three-pointer and smirking at the camera. Forms of religion are interpreted as to compel people to strap explosives to their chest and board buses full of innocents. Boss Tweeds embezzle and get severance pay while John Q. Workingman gets put out on the street when the corporation goes belly up.

Out of all these indignities and countless others I haven’t the time to mention, why do you make it your personal crusade to assist in the flagrant persecution of family restaurants for partaking in the time-honored tradition of singing “Happy Birthday”? God forbid these foul brigands bend copyright law in order to bring a smile to somebody’s face.

Food for thought…without the accompanying song.

Many others strike a defiant, if less poetic, tone:

Good luck! There are millions of us who refuse to accept the ridiculous “copyright” on Happy Birthday. If Time Warner were an ethical company rather than a greedy megacorp they would do something truly special and release it into the public domain.

There are some things in this world more important than money.

Quite a few people notice that my last name is Hill and suspect that I must be related to the Hill sisters who originally penned the song. I’m not, to my knowledge, although since Time Warner bought the rights, it’s not clear it would matter:

I am writing to just let you know how disappointed I am that a large corporation and others (like the HILL family) are making $2 million plus for a song that was created over 100 years ago with noone knowing who created the lyrics! None of us at our place of employment could believe this and we certainly won’t encourage people to send money to ASCAP. It is a shame that ASCAP license fees aren’t used to pay more to up-and-coming artists who I’m sure need this money alot more than Time Warner.

We all plan to sing Happy Birthday MORE now in public places and if anyone asks if it is copyrighted we will say “of course not”. Maybe this way the song will not die out completely as more and more other “birthday” songs are being sung. It would also be nice if your website cited whose opinion is writing the piece and your obvious conflict of interest.

Or another:

Is it a coincidence that your last name is the same as the last name of the authors of the song “Happy Birthday?” You seem to have a personal monetary motive for your work with the “grassroots project” you call Unhappy Birthday, and if you do not, your concern is misplaced all the same. Whom do you imagine your campaign serves? And do you realize whom it harms?

I do not question the illegality of performing the copyrighted song publicly. And you are correct that most of the public is not even aware that the song is under copyright. I think the harm done to Time Warner and its associates by such public performances is far outweighed by the joy created when the much-loved happy tune is shared.

I urge you to ask yourself why you think the immortal Hill sisters wrote the song in the first place. It was not to put more money Time Warner’s pocket. It was, I would argue, for the sake of the song itself and the happiness it brings when performed (publicly or otherwise). Please consider siding with the children and the artists; let the lawsuits alone.

Some people suspect the site may be satire, but include insults and and attacks just in case it isn’t:

I’m trying to figure out if your Unhappy Birthday site is meant to be in jest. If so Rofl, and congrats on a hilarious site. If you’re actually serious, then fuck you Nazi cunts and your corporate butt buddies. Thank you for your time.

Or these two alternatives (each were separate emails):

If this is a joke then it’s rather funny. However if this website is serious then you’re a fucking idiot. Get a life!!!!

if it is a form of protest, then THANK YOU! if it is not, then screw you all!

One memorable piece of mail was from someone who knew of me from my activities in the free software and free culture communities and had a hard time reconciling my work there with the high protectionist website:

I was quiet surprised to see your name and email address at the bottom of the home page of the site Unhappy Birthday. The site claims that you are their spokesman.

Is this correct? I do not understand… You have all this Open Source/ Free Software background and then this site that defends one of the most controversial copyright issues???

Do you really mean this? Do you want to help Time Warner?

I’ve also received probably half a dozen mails that offer some sort of support! For example, this person liked the website — and even wanted to buy one of our t-shirts — but objected to our logo:

I was going to buy one of your products from your Unhappy Birthday Shop at CafePress but there’s a problem.

I hate emblems that uses human skulls in them.

Being a member of ASCAP I really do support your cause but I can’t buy a product that I would never wear.

And many people are simply confused asking something like this one:

So I saw the unhappy birthday site and I’m just a little confused. Is this a joke or a serious thing?

I usually reply and explain that I have tried to ensure that the site describes the legal situation around Happy Birthday honestly and correctly.

That said, the vast majority of messages I receive are unequivocal. Like this email that I received last week addressed to “you anti-free speech fascists”:

         __
        /  \
        |  |
        |  |
        |  |
 __  __ |  | __
/  \/  \|  |/  \
|               \
|                |
|                /
|                \
|                 /
\                /
 |              |
 |              |

Half an hour later, the author followed up with a English version of the same message, set to the tune of happy birthday.

You might think that getting insulted and flipped off by confused people on the Internet might
get me down. It doesn’t! I made Unhappy Birthday because I thought that the fact that something as important to our culture as Happy Birthday could be owned was outrageous. Every piece of hate mail means that somebody else — almost always somebody who isn’t a “copyfighter” or a free culture geek — is now upset about the current state of copyright too.

Sure, Unhappy Birthday makes me a tiny bit sad about people’s ability to recognize satire. But it makes me really happy about people’s ability to get very annoyed at what they think is the outrageous control of our culture through copyright. When more people are as mad as the the people I’ve quoted above, we will be able to change copyright into something less outrageous to all of us.

Mystery Hunt

I’ve mentioned before that I compete every year in the MIT Mystery Hunt — an enormous, multi-day, round-the-clock puzzle competition held in January at MIT each year.

Last year, my team Codex won the hunt. The reward (punishment?) for winning is the responsibility to write the 100+ puzzles, (and meta-puzzles, and meta-meta-puzzles, and theme, and events) and to put on the whole event the following year.

So over the last year, I’ve worked with a huge group of folks to put together this year’s hunt which had a theme loosely based on The Producers. My own role was small compared to many of my teammates: I contributed to some puzzle writing and to a bunch of "test-solving" of candidate puzzles to make sure they were solvable, not too easy, fun, and well constructed. During the hunt, I visited competing teams, verified answer submissions, and took advantage of my jet-lag from my return from Japan on the day of the hunt to work the night shift distributing items to teams.

To get an idea of what the hunt is like, you can check out a puzzle I wrote for this years hunt. The solution is linked from the corner of that page.

Voice Message of Peace

The Community Wellness team at MIT has a program on stress reduction, mindfulness, and relaxation. Among their services is a guided three-minute relaxation exercise recording (available at extension 3-2256 or 617-253-CALM). It’s a very relaxing message.

At the end of the recording, there’s a revealing error where a standard voicemail robo-voice say "no messages are waiting" before you system hangs up on you. Turns out, the MIT wellness folks implemented this using the normal MIT voicemail system.

This gave me a thought: What if my voicemail greeting included a guided relaxation message as part of its greeting so that anyone who left a message had the chance to relax a little bit first? Would messages left for me be more positive after a window of serenity? Would people ask less of me? Would my callers feel more relaxed and happier during the rest of their day?

I just recorded a short version of the MIT message as my voicemail greeting. I suppose I will find out.

Iron Blogger

I want to blog frequently but usually don’t seem to find the time for it. I’m not above tying myself to the mast if it means blogging more.

Iron Blogger is a blogging and drinking club based on this premise. The rules are pretty simple:

  • Blog at least once a week.
  • If you fail to do so, pay $5 into a common pool.
  • When the pool is big enough, the group uses it to pay for drinks and snacks at a meet-up for all the participants.

Nelson Elhage ran the original Iron Blogger for about a year before the effort ran out of steam. I’ve started a new instance with a couple people from the previous group and a bunch of folks from Berkman, MIT, and beyond.

If you live in Boston and want to join, there are still a couple of spots available. I’m going to cap the current group, at least temporarily, at about 30 people because I think that’s the maximum we’ll fit into a local pub. Look over the site and send me an email if you’re interested.

If you don’t live in Boston but want to organize your own Iron Blogger, you can use the software in Nelson’s git repository (or my branch) to automate nearly the whole process of tracking posts, generating reports, and updating the ledger of debts.

Die Technikmafia

Marcus Rohwetter has recently published a very detailed article about Antifeatures in the German monthly magazine Zeit Wissen. Although I’ve only read the article through automatic translation — unfortunately, I don’t read German — I’m hugely honored that Rohwetter has taken the time to engage with the idea so deeply and to help translate the argument for a much broader community than the free software community I come from and am best able to speak to.

A lot of what I’ve been trying to do in the last year or so is to figure out how to speak more effectively about the politics of technology control to audiences of non-technologists. Indeed, that’s the whole point of the antifeatures concept. I deeply appreciate the help of Rohwetter, and others, in that project.

Between the Bars

Almost a year ago, I blogged about Between the Bars — a project that offers a blogging platform to the 1% of the United States population that is currently incarcerated. The way it works is pretty simple: prisoners send letters through the postal mail. We scan them and put them up on the web. Visitors can transcribe letters or leave comments which are mailed back to the authors.

About a month ago, my collaborator Charlie DeTar and I finally finished planning and paperwork and opened the site to bloggers. Over the last few weeks, we’ve had a bunch of authors sign up. We now have a daily stream of blog posts going up on the site.

Please visit the site. Leave comments. Transcribe posts. If you know of prisoners who might like to use the site, let them know. If you want postcard fliers to send to prisoners, let us know.

On Feminism and Microcontrollers

A month or so ago, I published a paper with Leah Buechley that is mostly an analysis of how the LilyPad Arduino has been used. I read an earlier draft last year and loved it so, when the opportunity arose, I was honored to help out as the paper evolved.

LilyPad is a microcontroller platform that Leah created a few years back and that is specifically designed to be more useful than other microcontroller platforms (like normal Arduino) in the context of crafting practices like textiles or painting. Leah’s design goal with LilyPad was to create a sewable microcontroller that could be useful for making things that were qualitatively different from what most people made with microcontrollers and that, she hoped, would be of interest to women and girls.

Our paper tries to measure the breadth of LilyPad’s appeal and the degree to which it accomplished her goals. We used sales data from SparkFun (the largest retail source for both Arduino and LilyPad in the US) and a crowd-sourced dataset of high-visibility microcontroller projects. Our goal was to get a better sense of who it is that is using the two platforms and how these groups and their projects differ.

We found evidence to support the suggestion that LilyPad is disproportionally appealing to women, as compared to Arduino (we estimated that about 9% of Arduino purchasers were female while 35% of LilyPad purchasers were). We found evidence that suggests that a very large proportion of people making high-visibility projects using LilyPad are female as compared to Arduino (65% for LilyPad, versus 2% for Arduino).

Digging deeper, qualitative evidence suggests a reason. LilyPad users aren’t just different. The projects they are making are different too. Although LilyPad and Arduino are the same chips and the same code, we suggest that LilyPad’s design, and the way the platform is framed, leads to different types of projects that appeal to different types of people. For example, Arduino seems likely to find its way into an interaction design project or a fighting robot. LilyPad seems more likely to find its way into a smart and responsive textile. Very often, different types of people want to make these projects.

Leah and I believe that there’s a more general lesson to be learned about designing technologies for communities underrepresented in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) — and for women in particular.

The dominant metaphor in the discussion on women in computer science is Margolis and Fisher’s idea of "unlocking the clubhouse." The phrase provides a good description of the path that most projects aimed at broadening participation of women in computing projects seem to take. The metaphor is based around the idea that computing culture is a boys’ club that is unfriendly to women. The solution is finding ways to make this club more accessible to those locked outside.

It should go without saying that we share Margolis and Fisher’s goal of increasing participation of women in STEM. That’s LilyPad’s point, after all. It it hopefully also clear that we’re supportive of, and involved in, projects working to remove systematic barriers to participation by women and other groups. That work must continue. But I also think that Leah’s work with LilyPad suggests another way forward based on addressing issues of self-selection that will affect even the most welcoming technological communities. Here’s what we say in our paper:

Our experience suggests a different approach, one we call Building New Clubhouses. Instead of trying to fit people into existing engineering cultures, it may be more constructive to try to spark and support new cultures, to build new clubhouses. Our experiences have led us to believe that the problem is not so much that communities are prejudiced or exclusive but that they’re limited in breadth–both intellectually and culturally. Some of the most revealing research in diversity in STEM found that women and other minorities don’t join STEM communities not because they are intimidated or unqualified but rather because they’re simply uninterested in these disciplines.

One of our current research goals is thus to question traditional disciplinary boundaries and to expand disciplines to make room for more diverse interests and passions. To show, for example, that it is possible to build complex, innovative, technological artifacts that are colorful, soft, and beautiful. We want to provide alternative pathways to the rich intellectual possibilities of computation and engineering. We hope that our research shows that disciplines can grow both technically and culturally when we re-envision and re-contextualize them. When we build new clubhouses, new, surprising, and valuable things happen. As our findings on shared LilyPad projects seem to support, a new female-dominated electrical engineering/computer science community may emerge.

I have a strong belief that computing can be an empowering tool and that expanding users’ control over technology is a critically important issue. Our paper argues that we should attempt to expand participation in computing by broadening the possibilities of computing, rather than only by broadening participation in extant, computing organizations, projects, and genres.

Even if computing and electrical engineering communities were perfectly welcoming (which they are not) most people (both male and female, but disproportionately female) will choose not to participate. Building new clubhouses requires creativity of its proponents and risks charges of reinforcing stereotypes and existing status hierarchies. But, executed carefully and well (as I believe LilyPad has been), it suggests ways to reach the majority of people that no "unlocking" project will ever seem relevant to.

Contribute to AcaWiki

In the process of studying for my PhD general examinations this year, I ended up writing summaries about 200 academic books and articles.

AcaWiki is a wiki designed to host summaries of academic articles so it seemed like a great place to host these things. Over the last few months, I’ve uploaded all these summaries. Since I’ve finished, I’ve continued to add summaries of other articles as I read them.

My summaries tend to be rough. I write them, run them through a spellchecker, and then post them. I don’t even reread them before publishing. I hope to improve them as I reread them over time. Of course, because I’ve uploaded them to wiki, I hope others will add to and improve the summaries as well.

AcaWiki uses Semantic Mediawiki and provides nice platform for publishing, editing, and collaboration. Although there are still ways in which the platform can be better, what is needed now is, quite simply, more contributors. I am sad to see that my summaries make up a big chunk of all summaries on the site.

So if you are a student, an academic, or anyone else who writes or has written summaries of articles or books or if you might want to do so, you should consider contributing your summaries, in whatever form, to AcaWiki. I’ve done a little work to help integrate AcaWiki and Zotero which might make things easier.

Doctoral students reading for qualifying or general examinations in particular should should consider taking notes and studying with AcaWiki. From the student’s perspective, writing summaries can be one of the best way to reflect on and learn a literature. In the process, one can create a great resource for the rest of the world. If a single doctoral student from each of twenty diverse fields of study published summaries of the 200 key articles in their area, AcaWiki would have the critical core of what is most relevant in academia. Help us build it!

Selectricity Source

After a semi-recent thread on debian-devel, I poked around and realized that I’d never actually gotten around to formally announcing the release of source code for Selectricity, a piece of web-based election software designed to allow for preferential decision-making and to provide "election machinery for the masses." Selectricity is useful for a range of decisions but it targets all those quick little decisions that we might want to decide preferentially but where running a vote would be overkill.

Things were delayed through a drawn out set of negotiations with the MIT Technology Licensing Office over how to release the code under a free software license of my choosing. I was swamped when things finally came through. Over time, I managed to forget that I never did a formal announcement, never setup a mailing list, and never did all those things that I have tried to teach other people in the Free Software Project Management HOWTO. Code just sort of appeared on my website under the GNU Affero General Public License. It was until the debian-devel thread that I remembered I’d never made a formal announcement. Sorry about that!

The git repository has been online and accessible through searches for more than a year now. Most folks who wanted the code seem to have been able to find it there. Indeed, a number of people have set up their own instances and a few have submitted patches to the code! But more visibility for the source means more empowered users, more visibility for free software, and more developers.

So I’ve shipped all the code into a project in Gitorious (its like GitHub, except free), announced things on the Selectricity Blog, changed the Selectricity footer of to include a prominent link to the source. I’ve also created a mailing list. The Gitorious project page includes a wiki.

I also want to mention this all here because the attention of the current development team seems mostly to have moved on to other projects. The current team seems able to keep the hosted version up and running, and even gets around to little improvements now and then, but there’s definitely room for new life and new leadership.

There are some nearly-complete and "complete minus further testing" features in the development tree that might provide low hanging fruit for folks interested in elections and decision-making who might want to get involved in Selectricity development. If you’re interested and know (or want to learn) Rails, feel free to check out the code, introduce yourself on the list or contact team@selectricity.org to coordinate.